Beware of overseas link building companies?

If you are like me, you get hundreds of emails from Link Building companies based in India. Usually these guys just end up in my Trash never to be seen again. However, during a brief moment of madness I decided to give one of them a go (with one of my own pet projects you understand, not one of my clients sites) just to see how effective and efficient they actually were.

It wasn’t a costly exercise, which perhaps in itself should have sent the alarm bells ringing a little bit. I placed the order and paid for the project. This was followed by a polite confirmation email and also a follow up email from my new ‘account manager’.

Sure enough, with a day confirmation emails starting to flood to my account as the links were submitted to the directories. Great stuff.

Upon completion of the project I received a PDF with a list of all the directories that my site had been submitted to. Now the fun and games began. Me being me I decided to go through each and every link one by one to double check the sites that they had been submitted to. What surprised me was that at least 20% of the links on the first page of their report were actually dead! So – is this a scam or do link building sites literally die on a regular basis?

In summary I think that the popular link building sites that are worth anything to your SEO campaign have been established for some time, usually with a reasonable page rank. You are much better talking to a Canada based SEO Company such as Think Tank SEO in Calgary or browsing the web to look for directory lists than taking the plunge and parting with a small amount of money for what in return is a small effect on your SEO campaign. I guess the old saying that you get what you pay for couldn’t me more true in this example!